Sylos

To elaborate on how Google can track your users:

The user's browser downloads the font off of Google's server, which gives Google their IP address, and the browser also tells Google's server what webpage it's currently visiting, via the HTTP referer.

And given that almost every webpage ships something from Google, Google has an almost complete browsing history for every public IP. There's generally multiple devices behind one public IP, especially for corporate networks or VPNs, so they still have to demultiplex that with further tracking, e.g. Google Analytics, Chrome Sync, Android, but that's rarely a problem either, as even if you're carefully avoiding these, everyone else under your public IP using them would be enough to single you out.

I can see a few reasons:

1. It's a full-featured, widely tested desktop environment. If a user can't figure out how to enable Bluetooth in LXQt or there's screen tearing in Xfce, then they might blame your hardware. You especially also need someone to rely on, who does ARM builds, which many distros do, but fixing the build of the desktop environment often is something you need the help of the DE devs for.

2. It looks modern and polished. You can theme the more lightweight alternatives, but they often still have UI elements that are not correctly aligned and such.

3. The KDE Community is big, and many of them got the news of this Pinebook. If some buy it for themselves, or gift it to someone, or just tell their friends about it, that might very well be your first year of funding secured.

4. It is kind of news-worthy on its own that one of the most feature-rich OSs ships on one of the cheapest laptops.

Happens on Firefox for Android, too...

I once was at a dev meetup and the speaker asked who in the room used FOSS. About 25% raised their hands.

So, in other words, about 75% did not know what FOSS means or have no clue what software they're using.

I was about to say that, you know, it's probably not necessary to know what FOSS means in order to just do your job, but no, it actually is necessary. If you want to use a library, you need to have at least a basic idea of what its license means.

I'm especially curious how they plan to do that in the EU.

The GDPR requires that you separate your requests for consent for ads from the consent for stuff which is actually necessary to be provided the service.

If customers don't consent to their data being used for ads, you can't use it for ads, but you also can't blackmail them by not providing the service then.

Also, you as a company are responsible to have the customer understand what they're signing.

If all of these would be done correctly, why would anyone ever sign the consent sheet for you processing their data to show them ads? All they get out of this, is their personal data at risk of being leaked.

Which I think is a dangerous train to be getting on.

The GDPR is likely only the first such law, other countries will also enact some form of privacy laws. And the first round of lawsuits from the GDPR are still underway. Once those have gone through, things should hopefully change quite a bit more still, as most companies are still in violation of the GDPR.

And if that all does go through, the business model of Google and Facebook is going to become much less profitable.

Firefox has more than two process classes. I'm probably missing some still, but it separates at least into main process, content processes (tabs), NPAPI plugin process and extension processes (at the time of his writing, I believe this was one big extension process still).

There's also a process for Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ), but that probably doesn't help much with security.

I love the linked /r/chrome thread.

Normally it goes "Chromium is open-source, and the telemetry in Chrome isn't actually that bad". (Which it probably isn't, but Chrome Sync is bad.)

And now someone points out another major privacy problem and it all switches over to "Why would you ever use a browser from Google, if you cared about privacy?".

I am wondering, if these are PR people from Google and this is a marketing strategy, to always paint the extremes. Sort of as a last stand to make people feel like they either have to give up all Google software or none, whereas even giving up some Google software would already improve your privacy. (And there is no human being who doesn't care at all about privacy.)

> Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg?

Facebook fucked up twice, leaking user data. First Cambridge Analytica and about a month ago an even bigger leak.

If the guy is high enough up in the hierarchy, there's a good chance that he can sign off on even illegal things.

Looking at how Google is handling the GDPR, for example, there's just as well plenty obvious violations that someone had to sign off on and that are gonna cost them a few billions once they can't drag the lawsuits out any longer. In the meantime, though, they're very likely making enough money to offset that, which is why executives can sign off on illegal things in the first place. It's just a basic risk analysis in the end.

As has already been said JavaScript, Flash and such are the biggest risk. Browser vendors have tried to mitigate the attacks, but last I heard, only Mozilla's mitigation was actually effective at preventing attacks.

I'd also personally not feel comfortable using a Windows PC, given that running unchecked 3rd-party code is sort of required to do anything with it.

They are completely intransparent about what they collect and legal systems around the world also fail catastrophically at regulating this in any way.

What if they send the data contained in the text files that I open with that text editor? There's partially passwords and such in the files that I edit.

If I knew exactly that all they send is the average size of the files I edit or similar data, I would actually have no problem at all. But Microsoft has proven a lot of times already that what they consider perfectly acceptable telemetry is not in the slightest the same as what I consider acceptable. So, even with something as innocuous as text editor telemetry, I can't trust them to not fuck up and for some reason collect data that I consider sensitive anyways.

Microsoft does a ton of lobbying to prevent that.

> KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble.

I'm not too deep into GNOME's architecture, but I don't see that at all.

KDE is the KF5 Frameworks on top of Qt on top of QML and C++. Desktop widgets, panel widgets etc. are all architecturally the same thing, "Plasmoids". Settings screens are all isolated and also architecturally the same thing, "KCMs".

On the other hand, GNOME is GTK on top of GObject on top of C, Vala, JS, Python, Rust and a few other languages still, because they still haven't really decided what they want to go with. The extensions are written in JavaScript, but run in the same process as the entire Shell, meaning that if anything locks up or just takes longer in an extension, then your Shell does the same.

I don't want to argue that GNOME is horrible in this aspect, but in my opinion KDE is better at it.

This page may also answer some of your questions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components

I do think so, yes, but I also think that they still could not actually escape. That they'd go bankrupt within a year, or at least that they'd have to shrink their operation to only cover the Chinese market, which doesn't have access to the Play Store, but also isn't terribly excited for yet another US company trying to enter their market.

I was thinking of openSUSE and Ubuntu, but you're right that openSUSE still has 32-bit libraries around.

In the openSUSE Leap 15.0 standard repos, there's 6554 packages named "lib..." and 1368 named "lib...32bit", so roughly 20% of libraries have a 32 bit version still, which obviously could well be enough to contain all the libraries needed for Steam. (In total, there's 36237 packages, of which 1804 are 32 bit.)

With Ubuntu, I'm not entirely sure, as I don't run it, I've just heard that Lubuntu is having problems, because they would still like to support 32-bit, but with other Ubuntu flavors not anymore being released with 32-bit support, they're having trouble keeping it up. Might just be proper testing of the 32-bit libraries, though.

Well, and then there is obviously more niche distributions, which never bothered with 32-bit. Chakra Linux, for example, is so niche, they don't even provide any GTK applications in their main repository, and I think no 32-bit packages either. They do have a community repository, which has more stuff in it, but even there, I can only find around 20 packages with 32-bit support.

Flatpak and Snap are new package formats, which allow bundling software with all the libraries that it needs.

Advantage is that developers can package exactly those versions of the libraries that they tested with and know to be working.

Disadvantage is that if there's a security problem or bug in one of those libraries, you're dependent on the developer to release a new version of the Flatpak or Snap package.

Another disadvantage is that libraries can't be shared between applications, which increases hard drive and RAM usage.

A second important aspect of Flatpak and Snap packages, which is however not relevant to the discussion, is that the execution of the packaged applications is done in a sandboxed environment.

It's not 2018 and Linux still has issues with this, rather it's 2018 and Linux is starting to have real issues with this.

Windows is the only desktop OS where 32-bit is still commonly used. On Linux, you nowadays generally don't have any 32-bit applications installed. Many Linux distributions don't offer 32-bit support anymore at all, because you'll have a seriously hard time finding hardware that doesn't support 64-bit.

With Steam however at the moment still only being available as 32-bit, you need 32-bit versions of the libraries that Steam uses. Distributions not hosting 32-bit libraries anymore, means you need to get these libraries in a different way.

Many distributions now actually offer you to install a Steam installer, which then gets the necessary 32-bit libraries from elsewhere.

You can also install Steam through a new package format, called "Flatpak", which includes all the necessary libraries directly in the package.

But these are all new workarounds and may still have problems. Flatpak in fact has only turned 1.0 a few days ago.

Since Windows 8, Windows uses a form of hibernation internally. When there's no updates to install, it doesn't actually shut down in the classic sense. Instead, it closes any applications, then hibernates the OS. So, it writes the contents of the RAM to the hard drive, then it powers off.

When it's being powered on again, it just loads that state from the hard drive, rather than running a boot process, which results in significantly better boot times. It however also has drawbacks. It can cause instabilities and it leaves the hard drive in some unworkable state.

The latter is why most people will want to turn this feature off when dual booting. If you don't turn it off and you only have one hard drive with partitions for each OS, you're actually not going to be able to boot Linux (or install it in the first place).

If you have physically separate hard drives, you're not going to be able to access files on your Windows drive, which if it's a gaming-only system might not be as important, but otherwise is still kind of handy.

The original reasoning for Valve's Linux push was the shock from how terrible Windows 8 was and for the most part still is.

At that point, they realised that if Microsoft is being stupid, there's nothing they can do against it. Almost their entire market is in the hand of Microsoft.

And yeah, it certainly didn't help that Windows 8 featured the Windows Store, therefore officially competed with Steam, and included a new application API (Metro Apps, now known as UWP), which I think back then was still exclusive to the Windows Store. Nowadays you technically can sideload them, but if we look at Android, that's still not much comfort.

That's optimistic...

Google exerts a lot of power over Android.

The EU did recently punish Google for that, so theoretically Google now has to stop with it, but up until this point, they forced manufacturers to only ever preinstall the Google version of Android (or permanently lose their license to preinstall the Google Apps) and also forced manufacturers to always install the whole Google app bundle, not just the Play Store.

To put their power into perspective, just remember that Amazon has been in the game of distributing an Android fork and alternative app store for a while now. And Amazon is magnitudes bigger than Valve.

The official version is that Gabe Newell thought Windows 8 to be a catastrophe, presumably due to the horrible UI. That Microsoft would single-handedly crash the PC market and take down Steam with it. So, they wanted to become less dependent on Microsoft in general.

Windows 10 is somewhat less of a catastrophe in the UI department (though there is something to be said about mostly being able to ignore the mobile UI in Windows 8), but it's still controversial with its often illegal data collection. I mean, it's probably not going to happen, because the entire world depends on it, but theoretically countries could still block the sale of Windows 10.

But yeah, I don't believe myself either that the Windows Store is not seen as a threat. When you own a platform, you can push pretty much any software to be dominant on it.

Apple doesn't allow other browser engines than WebKit in its App Store, so Chrome on iOS uses WebKit, not Blink, and the problem is probably actually WebKit-specific.

Lawsuit for that is on its way. Filed by NOYB in the night that the GDPR took effect.

Sure, there exists some amount X, but you can hardly remedy a complete temporay ban with money.

Because it means that users have to look at alternatives. They might find that they prefer them in the long run, and it might even just incentivize competition to keep going. And this is especially damaging in monopoly-like situations, as many users don't even know of competing products.

Antitrust does not require a monopoly, it just requires enough of a market dominance that hurting the market is feasible for you, and then exploiting this position to actually hurt the market.

Basically, all you have to do, is hurt the market in noticeable ways. The sole goal of antitrust laws is keeping the market healthy. They're not fair and have almost no rules attached to them.

It was sarcasm, as the monopolies that the USA have shielded for so long, have basically killed off the IT market everywhere. There obviously are European tech companies, but even those are often owned by those US-American megacorps.

> It’s similar to the General Data Protection Regulation that went into effect in the European Union last month, but adds to it in crucial ways. Under the GDPR, businesses are required to get users' permission before collecting and storing their data. But the way most companies have designed those opt-in pop-ups, "you really don't have a choice," says Ashkan Soltani

Those opt-in dialogs that don't actually leave you a choice are not legal under the GDPR. So, you cannot add to the GDPR in crucial ways and somehow make these more illegal.

In fact, the GDPR even requires that revoking once given consent is just as easy as giving it. So, companies that have no problem interpreting a single click as consent for something that you need a team of lawyers and tech experts to actually understand the implications of, will have to also somehow present users with a one-click process for revoking this consent.

Companies like Google and Facebook just don't adhere to the GDPR and there's no reason to assume that they will adhere to this new law either. They've placed these clearly illegal dialogs and are now waiting for lawsuits to follow through, requiring them to actually adhere to the law then. They're gambling for the punishment to not be as high as the profit that they'll turn in the time that the lawsuit is not yet settled.

I mean, there's other map providers as well. OpenStreetMap is generally good with providing lots of map detail (whereas they are not good as a Google at providing the sort of in-depth information like opening times or that this shop has been rated 5/5 by the owner, their mother and their alt account).

https://www.openstreetmap.org/

Popular app that uses OpenStreetMap-data: https://osmand.net/